We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day I did some coke, and slept with a whore. But that’s what a superinjunction is for!
– Robbie Williams, at last week’s Take That show at Wembley, mocks the legalised suppression of free speech. Quoted by Fraser Nelson in his obituary for the News of the World, in the News of the World.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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People at the NotW and hired by the NotW have broken the law. Fine, arrest them, charge them and sent them to prison. A lack of laws is not the problem here. Other journalists (many of them at the Guardian) have exposed what was going on. Well done them. The police and the government and the previous government did nothing, either because they were directly in the pay of people from the NotW or because it was in their expedient political interests to do nothing.
So in return we should hobble the press and pass a new set of laws that further protects the police and politicians? Give me a break.
I am waiting to see how many police are arrested for taking bribes. If it is a significant number, and if they are punished at least as harshly as anyone from or working for the NotW, then I might have some hope. They should be punished more harshly than anyone from the NotW, not less harshly, because they are in a position of trust and because they are supposed to be honourable. Journalism on the other hand is not an honourable profession, and if it aspires to be it becomes less good at its job.
“Journalism on the other hand is not an honourable profession, and if it aspires to be it becomes less good at its job.”
I’m sorry, but no: that is a breathtakingly stupid thing to say. Journalists are charged with the responsibility of bringing to light precisely the sort of crimes and other abuses of “trust” perpetrated by members of public institutions that you refer to. Their “dishonour” is when they fail in this charge, not when they carry it out.
No, it is not a “breathtakingly stupid thing to say”. I suspect it is actually a semantic issue of what “honourable” means. Digging though someone’s garbage might not meet some people’s criteria for “honourable” even if they think said action may be necessary.
Well, yes. It does come down to what I meant by “honourable”, Roughly, though – should a policeman ever break the law to gain evidence? Well, no, never. I would see this as being an “honourable” profession in the sense that you take an oath of integrity and to do the job properly you need to keep that oath at all time.
Of course, policemen are often not honourable as individuals, but the nature of their job requires that they be held to a very high standard (which once again doesn’t always happen). A policeman has tools available to him that a journalist hasn’t – for instance he can get a warrant to conduct a search that would otherwise be illegal – but a policeman who breaks the law should almost always be condemned for it.
Should an investigative journalist ever break the law to gain evidence, even if it potentially means going to prison for it? I think sometimes, yes. The line as to how far a journalist should go to get a story is a muddy one, and it should be a muddy one, and how muddy is going to depend on the importance of the story. The story that the journalist ultimately writes should be truthful, but there can (and should) be fewer scruples as to how he got the story. Getting the story can be morally dubious, Journalists are not above the law and should suffer the consequences of their actions, but that is sometimes something that should be worried about later.
Turning journalism into an opportunity for Ivy League educated people to be sanctimonious about their own sense of moral goodness is not productive, but that is largely what American newspaper journalism has turned into. I prefer British gutter journalism to that.
It is interesting to contrast the justifiable condemnation being poured by all sides on NOTW for the hacking of phones, etc, with the excuses that get made for governments’ payment for stolen data in pursuit of say, alleged tax evaders using Swiss bank accounts.
Just thought I should point that out. And let’s remember, that the NOTW hacks are not accused of waterboarding anyone, either.
The primary violator of freedom remains, remember, the state.
I liked what Andrew Sullivan said about journalism in the early Aughties: It isn’t really hard or complicated, you just need a phone and a conscience.
And for the next Quotation Of The Day, I nominate the following:
“We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.” — U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, on the impending ban of incadescent light bulbs